Over the years, we’ve built something pretty amazing with the desktop Firefox support on SUMO, so this year it’s all about optimizing and oiling that engine to go from great to awesome. Overall, the goal in 2013 is to decrease issue-driven churn.

Snapshots of support.mozilla.org over the years.

Some of this has already been covered in the first part of this blog series — the stuff that applies to all of our products — but it’s worth repeating some of it here since desktop Firefox represents the vast majority of our traffic on support.mozilla.org today. There are two main components to this that will contribute to increased retention and user loyalty that we are responsible for:

Understand our users by listening to their feedback. This is what the User Advocacy team is focusing their efforts on.

Delighting our users with better-than-expected support. This is what the Desktop & Cross-Product Support team focuses on, including efforts like a kick-ass education strategy. But it also includes our focus on providing kick-ass help articles and covering more topics and answers.

Achieve 100% resolution rate in English support forum

To be clear, 100% resolution rate here means that no posts in the forum should be left unresolved. In other words, any user posting a question should get an answer to their question, and if that answer doesn’t solve their problem, we won’t give up until that problem is solved. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all resolutions will please the user — for example, if a user posts a question like “Why is there no official version of Firefox for Playstation 3?” we will simply do our best to explain why and resolve the thread that way. While the user may disagree with our answer, we would consider that thread resolved. So we won’t exactly achieve magic here — but we’ll get pretty close. ;)

Let’s be clear about one thing: this is a very ambitious goal. It will take a huge effort from everyone involved: our insane community of volunteers, our awesome WebDev team to prepare the platform for things like being able to mark threads as “unsolvable” (similar to the INVALID resolution in Bugzilla) and streamline the interface, and of course the SUMO team itself. There will no doubt be some threads that will be left behind or forgotten in the day-to-day answering of questions in our community. Because of this, we will need to have people ready to “fill in the gaps” as they appear, and to ensure that all threads that already have an answer actually lead to a resolution. Do you think we can do it? Would you like to help us while learning more about our products and development processes? Come join us in the forum!

Provide first response to all forum questions within 24 hours

Another forum-related goal this year is to ensure that everyone gets a first response within 24 hours of posting a question in the forum. This is part of our commitment to delight users with our support, and in reality we’ll aim to do even better than 24 hours — but this is already an ambitious goal as it is!

The good thing is that already making great progress in our ability to provide timely responses. In fact, we’re already responding to close to 80% of all of our questions within 24 hours. But the road to 100% will be both challenging and fun at the same time!

That’s it for desktop Firefox this year. Piece of cake, right? ;) In the next part, I’ll walk you through our goals for Firefox for Android.

Browsing habits are the kind of things that gradually change over time without you even realizing it. If you look back a year ago, I’m sure some of the most visited websites today weren’t even on the top 20 list then. An obvious example is that quarterly goals page from Q3 2011 that you visited every day for a full quarter, and then suddenly never looked at again.

What’s even more interesting for me is how my mobile browsing habits have gradually changed into something very different from my desktop browsing habits. A couple of years ago, I used to visit roughly the same sites on both devices, but over time I found myself visiting some websites more from my mobile, and other websites more from my desktop computer.

Today, the separation is very clear: I almost exclusively use my desktop computer for work-related browsing (wikis, Etherpads, calendars, reports, etc), and I use my mobile phone mostly for casual browsing (news, social media, tech, blogs, etc). Another separation along the same lines is that I mostly use my desktop computer to write, and I use my mobile phone to read.

This actually makes me a little torn about the Firefox Sync implementation on Android today. On the one hand, I absolutely love the fact that I can have convenient access to all pages I visit on the desktop, and I simply can’t live without the pre-filled passwords. But on the other hand, I’m not sure I’m too crazy about the fact that all of those “Top Sites” are mixed together the way they are on the Awesome Screen. At the end of the day, I find it distracting to see ten different flavors of https://mail.mozilla.com/zimbra/#%5Binsert number here], or twenty different Etherpads or wiki pages all mixed up with the handful of sites that I actually do want to visit from my phone.

This is one of the things that I like about the stock Android browser on my Samsung Galaxy Note: it allows me to define exactly how I want the top bookmarks to look like, even in which order they should appear in the thumbnail grid.

Some things that would make my use of Firefox on Android feel more awesome:

An intuitive, quick way of arranging my top sites and bookmarks and ensure duplicates aren’t bubbling up at the top.

An option to view the top sites as a thumbnail grid instead of a list.

An option (or simply changed default) to not show the soft keyboard until you hit the text field again — I just want to click the top site rather than type on the keyboard.

Firefox Awesome Screen

All this said, I don’t know what I’d do without Firefox Sync. It really enables me to accomplish stuff on my phone that I previously had to use my desktop computer for. The only downside, I suppose, is that it also makes it that much easier to switch your mind back into work mode after stumbling on that interesting report, or Etherpad, or wiki page that you’re not supposed to read when trying to wind down after a long workday… :)